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The tastes of childhood evoke happy memories

By Sherie PosesorskiSpecial to the Star

Fri., June 14, 2019timer6 min. read

For the narrator of author Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, a bite of Madeleine cake unleashed his childhood recollections. My memory Madeleine was the sight of a candy rack next to a supermarket checkout. A couple times a week after grade school, my best friend and I would go to a nearby variety store. On the walk there, I never heard what she was saying because I was too busy concentrating on what chocolate bar shmekn (Yiddish for taste craving) I was feeling most that day. Was it a Rolo, Cadbury Caramilk or Neilson’s Chocolate Chunks?

Catching sight of the inevitable chocolate smears on my teeth and lips, my mother Dora would complain about me ruining my appetite for supper, and worse my teeth. These complaints though were half-heartened, she knew and I knew, because my mother too loved chocolate.

As a teenager in Poking, a displaced persons camp in Germany, her family resided in while waiting to immigrate to Canada following the Second World War, she agonized over how much of the chocolate given to her and the rest of the camp children by American soldiers, to eat immediately, and how much save for later, worrying that an older brother might strong-arm away whatever she hadn’t eaten.

Her grumbling about the mess the melted chocolate remnants left in my pockets also was perfunctory since her purses were littered with wrappers and crumbs from her favourites — Kit Kat and Coffee Crisp.

Since chocolate didn’t do it for my father Irving, my mother baked the sweets he loved from his childhood — marble and sponge cakes, and cinnamon Mandelbrot (biscotti like cookies). And we eagerly looked forward each summer to the sugary blueberry buns my father’s brother Jack, who worked at Health Bread Bakery, brought on his weekly visits.

Food was a preoccupation in our family in an intense way it wasn’t in the families of my friends whose parents were Canadian born. I understood it was because of the deprivation my parents had experienced during the war. I once asked my mother if she had been afraid of dying then. She replied that what she had feared most was hunger; she was always hungry.

When her family fled for safety to the Russian occupied region of Poland, the Russians arrested them, claiming they were spies and sent them as forced labour to a Siberian labour camp. The train taking them and the other prisoners to Novosibirsk, stopped daily for feeding. They were served mushy porridge and that was it for the day. She could never bear to eat the oatmeal she prepared for my father for breakfast because of the bad memories it prompted.

My father and his brother were hidden in a barn by Stanislaw, a farmer who was a friend of their murdered father, a grain merchant. To assuage their hunger, they crept into the fields at night, uprooted potatoes (replanting the root to hid the theft) and roasted them on a campfire. Returning to the barn, they milked cows and drank up. During the daytime, they often overheard Stanislaw’s mother (she was unaware that her son was hiding them) fret about the health of the cows since they were producing less milk and Stanislaw nervously reassuring her.

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So many of my parents’ favourite dishes and foods were ones from their childhood. My mother went to buy the ingredients at Kensington Market. The outdoor stalls with barrels of fruits, vegetables, pickles, nuts, and the kosher butchers and bakeries catering to Jewish immigrant clientele reminded her of the central market in her hometown of Krasnobrod. There, her father, a shoemaker, had sold the shoes he made at an outdoor stall — as he did in Kensington Market as well until he had the money to rent a small store.

First, we visited my grandparents at their stall, and then shopped. My food reward for accompanying my mother was a bag of buttered popcorn bought from one of the vendors stationed with popcorn machines in carts at the entrance to Honest Ed’s — our last stop for items not available at Kensington.

Of course, the best part was the eating of those foods at lunch and dinner. I rushed home at lunchtime from school knowing my favourites were waiting for me on the kitchen table — Chicago 58 All Beef Salami on rye bread, homemade chopped liver on Ritz Crackers and Daiter’s cream cheese slathered on a pietzel (pizza shaped flatbread coated with onions). This was washed down with seltzer water, (the pumped bottles delivered bi-beekly) mixed with raspberry sok (Polish for syrup.)

As I ate, my mother shared her lunchtime stories. When she was my age, she took lunch to her maternal grandmother who sold candies in the market. My mother guiltily admitted she only went because she wanted to hear the singers who stood next to her grandmother’s stall. The man played a mandolin, and the woman sang — not regular songs, but prophecies. My mother would sing to me in Polish one song predicting the end of the world that still haunted her, “Everyone came two by two and goes one by one.”

My father had his school lunchtime stories. His paternal grandparents lived near his school so he ate his noon meal with them — his grandmother cooking what he loved — sweet potato lentil soup, potato knishes with sour cream and mandelbrot.

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As a teenager during the summers, I shared lunchtimes with my father while working in the office of the small spring factory he owned. Twice a week, I accompanied him on his rounds to clients to pick up payments. We stopped at Bagel World, and loaded up buttered bagels, bagels with cream cheese and lox and coffees and teas to give to the office staff.

I would get a stink-eye from my father whenever I ordered a Coke — that being his bad memory food as porridge was for my mother. His first job in Toronto was at a clothing factory on Spadina Ave. At noon on his first day, the owner called him over, and told him he didn’t know how to work and paid him 50 cents. Then he said loudly,” You know what you can do with the 50 cents? You can buy yourself four streetcar tickets and a Coke.” My father was humiliated and furious at being treated like he was an ignoramus.

Dinner was the showcase for my mother’s traditional Jewish cooking. I never saw her use a cookbook. She enjoyed cooking and spent hours preparing dinners (thick soups, beef brisket, roasted chicken and turkey with side dishes of kasha, farfel and tzimmes — sweet carrot stew) and baking cakes, strudels and cookies. I loved eating her cooking. Still, spending hours cooking for 15 minutes of eating was nothing I wanted to do. After watching many a Swanson TV dinner commercial, I suggested my mother should buy those — not only did it save cooking time, I rationalized, but cleaning time because you could eat straight from the tray. She was horrified — not only were the dinner treyf (not kosher) but they were tasteless.

When my mother knew she was dying, she gave me a crash course on how to prepare my father’s preferred dishes. This was the first time her recipes were written down. I managed to learn to cook the main dishes but the rest were — the thick soups which took my mother hours, the gefilte fish she made from scratch, and the sweets were all store bought.

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My father was used to freshly made meals nightly. Now he reheated the meals I cooked in bulk on weekends. As we sat at the dinner table, neither of us sat in my mother’s chair. He was grateful and would compliment me by saying whatever dish I had prepared was just like my mother’s. We both knew this wasn’t so. They were never the same. I lacked my mother’s inventiveness and skill.

In his years with Alzheimer’s, my father continued to remember what he liked to eat, and not. On my visits to him in long-term care, I brought treats. I believed he relished them as much as did because the tastes evoked happy memories — the vanilla yogurt that of the sour cream he dolloped on his grandmother’s knishes; the blueberry muffins, the blueberry buns his brother Jack brought in abundance, and the barley mushroom soup of how he instructed my mother to make it just as he liked it — so thick with chickpeas that the stirring spoon stood soldier straight in the pot.

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